The transparency and position of semantic radicals modulate semantic activation in Chinese phonogram recognition: An ERP study

Chinese phonograms contain phonetic and semantic radicals, with semantic radicals being related to Chinese characters' lexical meanings. Prior studies have examined the critical role of positional and functional semantic radicals at the sub-lexical level, but their interaction mechanism remains unclear. This study adopted a semantic categorization task with an event-related potential (ERP) technique to investigate this interaction. Behavioral results showed that position and transparency interacted significantly in terms of accuracy and reaction times. Under transparent conditions, left-positioned semantic radicals yielded higher accuracy and faster responses than right-positioned ones, whereas no differences emerged between top- and bottom-positioned semantic radicals. ERP results showed that left-positioned semantic radicals elicited larger P2 amplitudes than right-positioned radicals under transparent conditions. No significant difference was observed between top- and bottom-positioned semantic radicals. Conversely, the N400 component displayed the opposite pattern: top-positioned semantic radicals elicited larger amplitudes than bottom-positioned radicals under transparent conditions. No significant difference was observed between left- and right-positioned semantic radicals. Notably, no effects were observed for either behavioral or ERP results under opaque conditions. These findings suggest that there is a significant position-function interaction effect in phonogram recognition.